thanks kevin. sorry about posting this here as i needed a quick response to my answer and thanks to you, i indeed got it.

i have another query and would appreciate if you could suggest me a workaround.

i have this text file basically containing a lot of object ids (OID) that i need to extract. there is no standard format for this file and OID's appear everywhere. It would be nice if i could extract all these OID's and dump them into an array or maybe another text file

very good, but maybe you could post your suggestion sooner next time? This thread is about 7 months old. But maybe better late than never. I never heard of that module but will take a look at it for future reference. -------------------------------------------------